Tenant Breaking Lease

[Account Closed]

I finally have an issue......

So tenant X in my duplex notifies me today that he needs to move out of state to follow his company that is relocating; his lease is through April 2017. X has paid rent consistently since the beg of the lease and is currently paid up through Nov.I have one month's rent as a security deposit and according to my lease I can keep the deposit since he's breaking the terms of the signed lease.

I feel best case scenario is I keep the deposit and have X move-out in Nov and try like heck to find a new tenant ASAP.

Curious to know how fellow BP members would handle said situation? What am I missing if anything??

[William Hochstedler]

This is very simple.  You have a cooperative tenant that has a very legitimate reason for breaking their lease. I'm not sure why we're talking about lawsuits and all of that.

Go to your tenant a present two options:

• Enforcing the lease, which means that you will help the tenant market the property and the tenant is on the hook for rents until the property is re-rented.  Normal security deposit rules apply.  (Tenant takes the risk of re-renting the property).  Because of this possibility, in our lease we have an assignment clause that allows the tenant to find a replacement but assesses a fee for our additional administrative costs for processing the turnover.  
• As @Christian Bors suggested, offer the tenant a lease buy out equal to two months rent and their done.  Normal security deposit rules apply.  (You take the risk of re-renting the property)

We usually favor the latter because if you are in a decent rental market and can re-lease in a couple of weeks you just made an extra six weeks of rent.  This is not charging double rents because the lease buy out is not rent.

Unless this property is in Vernal, you should be able to lease it pretty quickly in this market.

Good luck.